Ryan Barrett's blog

change firefox’s saved passwords

One
of my favorite Firefox features is Saved
Passwords, which saves
usernames and passwords for sites that require a login. Combined with the
Auto-Login user script, this easily saves
me 20-30 minutes every day.

When you change your password on a site, Firefox almost always notices and
changes its saved password too. Unfortunately, Firefox can’t be expected to grok
single-sign-on services like Passport and most
corporate intranets. If you change your single-sign-on password, you’re stuck
with the old saved password for every single-sign-on site you use. You could
delete their saved passwords, but then you’d have to re-enter your new password
for every site. Boo.

When I hit this roadbump recently, I rolled up my sleeves and dove into the
saved passwords file. Depending on the version of Firefox that created your
profile, this will be signons.txt, signons2.txt, or \[some_number\].s in
your Firefox profile
directory. (Mine is
~/.mozilla/firefox/default.jre/56011215.s.)

For each site, it stores the names of the username and password fields and your
(obfuscated) actual username and password. The obfuscation isn’t based solely on
the value, since sites with identical usernames and passwords will have
different obfuscated values. However, from what I can tell, the differences
aren’t based on the site’s URL, the field names, or anything else that matters.
They’re pure salt. So, you
can replace any stored password with any another, and Firefox will de-obfuscate
the replacement correctly.

This makes changing saved passwords en masse fairly easy. First, log into a site
with your new password, and check that Firefox saved it. Open the saved password
file, copy the stored password for that site, and paste it over the stored
password for each site you want to update. Restart Firefox, and you should
breeze past login pages just like normal!

If you have to do this often, it shouldn’t be hard to whip up an awk or perl
script to do it automatically. Even a simple Emacs regexp-replace would probably
do the job.

Far easier to go to ‘Tools’, ‘Options’, ‘Security’, ‘Saved Passwords’, ‘Remove’ – this gives the option to remove one password (rather than ‘Remove All’). Then simply go to the site for the password you have just removed and type in your user name and new password and save with Firefox at the prompt.

I have just done this as for some reason Firefox had saved a user name with a capital as the first letter and it insisted on over-writing when I tried to enter it correctly. I have now changed it and re-saved and it works! Simples :o)

Cathi, I did the same thing, BUT after removing the password saved for a certain site, Firefox no longer prompt for saving password, “remember password for sites” is checked, and no site listed in “exception”.
In fact, only the sites I never visited before pop up for saving password. Any sites that has been previously visited, won’t pop up for saving anymore.
Can anyone help?

Firefox Password Recovery is a smart and powerful utility to recover passwords to web sites saved in Firefox Web Browser and Thunderbird. This tool can get the list of all usernames and passwords saved in Firefox Web Browser with only one button click!
In addition, this program also allows you to reset Firefox Master password.

Why can’t a simple item in/on the tool par give you access to the straight forward access to all saved passwords/for each website you choose to save. Whoops! …accessed by your logon password, or some similar approach. 72 now and things aren’t getting easier, memory getting worse and all help is appreciated. So, while I am at it, give us the ability to have all files encrypted to a very high level, or, at least give us the option to select this. Also, make it so the government stuff on the computer is removed/corrupted or just plain made ineffective.